Yale To Rename Calhoun College For Grace Hopper

Carrie Doyle | February 13, 2017, 0:59

Yale To Rename Calhoun College For Grace Hopper

Hopper earned Yale degrees in the 1930s and became a US Navy rear admiral.

"We have a strong presumption against renaming buildings on this campus", the university's president, Peter Salovey, said on Saturday. But, in August, he appointed an advisory panel to consider whether the name should be changed after all.

"People of good will and intelligence have many different perspectives on this question", Salovey said.

"At that time, as now, I was committed to confronting, not erasing, our history", Salovey said. "So renamings are going to be exceptional".

The arrests were practiced and planned, and a final show of civil disobedience before the Yale Board of Trustees is expected to meet this weekend to discuss the name change of Calhoun College, an undergraduate residential college that has been the subject of controversy for more than a year.

Calhoun, a member of the Yale class of 1804, was a senator from SC and a leading voice for those opposed to abolishing slavery. He served as vice-president from 1825 to 1832.

In 2015, in the wake of white supremacist Dylann Roof's assault on the city's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which left nine black churchgoers dead. Ardent defender of slavery as a positive good. A few months later, Yale announced it would reconsider its decision, and that it would first create a system for evaluating requests for such name changes. This has not been taken well by a number of people and Chris Rabb, a 1992 Yale graduate, told the Associated Press on Saturday: "I'm underwhelmed". In 1931, it was named after John C. Calhoun, the seventh vice president of the United States, a Yale graduate and a hard-line slavery supporter. The name Calhoun is engraved throughout the college, including above the front gate, and the upper tier of Harkness Tower features a sculpture of Calhoun.

The Associated Press said the announcement appeared to draw a line under a controversy that has simmered at the CT university for many years, and even spilled over into protests on the campus in 2015.

Over the summer, a black dishwasher in Calhoun smashed a stained glass windowpane that depicted slaves working on a plantation, because found the image degrading. Calhoun will not be entirely erased from Yale; a statue of him will remain elsewhere on campus. An alumnus of Yale - 1804 B.A., 1822 LL.D - the university said Calhoun "helped enshrine his racist views in American policy, transforming them into consequential actions". Grace Hopper pioneered the development of word-based computer languages, and she was instrumental in developing COBOL, the most widely used computer language in the world by the 1970's.

Hopper was recalled to active service in the Navy at the age of 60, and retired as a rear admiral when she was 79. She is the recipient of Yale's Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal, the National Medal of Technology, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.